I had a great time at the West Michigan Day of .NET. 

Friday Night

After snagging a ride with Dan, Joe and Justin on their way through Coldwater, we arrived in Grand Rapids just after 7pm Friday night.  We spent a few minutes getting settled into our hotel rooms and then made our way across the street to meet everyone else for dinner.  We ended up being among the first to arrive, so we spent a few minutes catching up with Josh Holmes, Wally McClure and Dan Hibbitts while the staff prepared the tables.  It didn’t take long before people started showing up.  In the end I think there were around 20 people at dinner (me, Joe, Justin, Dan, Chris Woodruff, Josh, Dan, Wally, Amanda Laucher, Steven Harman, Tim Wingfield, James Bender, Dave Redding, Scott Zisherk, Dean Weber, Jeff McWherter, and a few other people — sorry if I didn’t include you).  It was a good time, but to be honest, the food sucked and the bartender couldn’t mix a decent Jack and Coke to save his life. :-\  I did catch Steven Harman in one of his more feminine moments — consuming some kind of pink, mildly alcoholic beverage out of a tall glass with an umbrella. 

Around 10:30 or so, about 10 of us headed back to the hotel in hopes of making the hotel bar our home for a couple hours.  I swear, we walked into the *hotel* bar around 10:45 or so and they were closing!  We managed to sneak one round in before moving on.  It was awesome listening to Steven Harman school everyone on git.   After the bar kicked us out, we wandered around looking for another place to hang out.  Unfortunately, there wasn’t much within walking distance except a Meijer so we ended up picking up some refreshments, walking back to the hotel and hanging out in Dan and Justin’s room (outside on the patio actually).  I finally went to bed around 2am, but didn’t sleep very well.  I think some of the guys stayed up until after 3!

The Event

Dan, Joe, Justin and I were out the door around 7:45 since Joe was speaking (Pragmatic Software Architecture and the Role of the Architect) in the first session.  After dropping Joe off and grabbing some breakfast, the 3 of us registered and then made our way to the speakers room where we were greeted by Joel Ross.  I actually missed the first two sessions because I was busy (well, I tried at least) putting some last minute tweaks in my slides and code.  I had planned on doing that the night before, but….well, I didn’t make the time.   I’m a bit bummed because I wanted to see Joel’s “Continuous Integration: What, Why and How” talk.  Josh Holmes gave me a sneak peak of his slides Friday afternoon, so I really wanted to see his “How to architect Rich Internet Applications” talk as well.  Ugh.  New rule for Mike: limit the partying the night before an event.

My “LightReader: The anatomy of a Silverlight application” talk was up against Dave Redding’s “The C# Variety Show” talk and Jeff McWherter’s “ASP.NET Performance and Optimization” session, but I still had a full room.  In fact, every seat was filled and there were probably 4-5 sitting on the floor.  I was happy to see several of my friends in the audience.  Overall, I think my talk went pretty well considering the previous night’s activities.  As I told the audience, LightReader is my tool for learning both Silverlight and WCF so much of my talk involved discussing the cons of working with a beta 1 product.  The app itself is still pretty immature, but hopefully I was able to get some people thinking about using Silverlight and WCF.

I spent lunch in the speaker room and then headed out with Josh and my friend Chris for some Chinese food.  

I volunteered to videotape Steven’s “A trip around the block with Rhino.Mocks” since I wanted to see his session anyway.  It was a really good discussion, but it didn’t really convince me to switch from Moq to Rhino.Mocks.   I did get a few minutes with Steven after his session to talk about how I was using Moq in the LightReader project.  I would love to spend a day (more more) working with Steve because he is one of those truly “scary” smart people plus he’s funny as hell. 

I spent the last session hanging out in the speakers room.  The speakers room was packed with super-smart people all day (everyone I mentioned above PLUS Jennifer Marsman, Jay Wren and Dan Rigsby – Dan, BTW, drove up from Indianapolis!) and I hated to leave (as you can probably tell).   At one point during the day, we even tried to get Alan Stevens on ooVoo, but the connection at the event kinda sucked so it didn’t last long.

At the end-of-event giveaways I scored a geek mug AND Expression Studio!  I really wanted CodeRush w/Refactor Pro, but oh well.  Maybe next time.  I’m pretty sure the copy of Expression Studio is the old version and not the one that was just released.  I’m a bit bummed about that…but again, it was free so who am I to complain, right?

By this time, I was completely exhausted so I skipped out on the after party.  I caught a ride back to Coldwater with my friend Chris.  We stopped for dinner in Lansing, but finally made it home around 8:30.  During the course of the day I picked up a few new twitter followers which I thought was very cool.

As I said earlier, I had a great time and it was good to see everyone again.  During the course of the day I met Bruce Abernathy and, after some searching, I found Matt Blodgett.  Matt and I have been twittering for a few months so it was great to finally meet him.   I also ran into a former co-worker (Pradeep) at the end of the day.

Next Saturday: The Cleveland Day of .NET!